Also, I think his lecture on biological underpinnings of religiosity that is a part of this course is not in the playlist, I think because its pretty controversial, you can find it as an old recording here

Quick review of Yuneec e-go cruiser as there aren't that many of those around. I'll try to mention things I was wondering and wasn't able to find out about online. I'm also lazy, so not that many links in this text, use google.

This is a chepaest longboard of a new generation (lipo batteries, sub 10kg) with also one of the best specs.

Weight

6 kg, one of the lightest boards around, until marbel comes out and changes the playing field.

Range

Official site claims 30km range. My experience in the real world is closer to 10km.

Speedo

I'm a dumb kid, I like going fast, and top speed of this board is 20 km/h which seemed slow, but its not. Longboard is not a bicycle, small obstacles would become too dangerous at higher speeds. In order to safely achieve higher speeds in city like environments wheels would have to be at least two times bigger, and then this wouldn't be a typical longboard anymore and it wouldn't be light.

Misc

The board is not totally quiet but the noise is nothing too much, some people might even enjoy it.

I don't feel comfortable climbing up sidewalk borders higher then ~5 cm, not sure if it's the lack of experience or just not the thing you would normally do with a 6kg longboard.

Its not waterproof. It will handle some splashing but it happened a few times that I couldn't turn it off before it dried.
Its easy to entirely disassemble and assemble, you even get the tool for it with the board.

Hacking

Yuneec is not friendly about it. I asked. But I'm guessing the board itself would be pretty friendly. Speed could be changed in order to kill myself more easily, I'm light, I'm pretty sure it could go faster then it does, I could for example just change the transmission, or perhaps replace the firmware or the speed controler entirely. And regarding the remote controler, the board supports bluetooth connection to iphone, this could be reversed and a custom controler could be made, for example just a glove which measures how bent your fingers are.

Customer Support

Great, if you talk to European branch. Asian branch is slow to respond if they respond, with bad english. After a week my wheel randomly fell off, the bearing broke. These are good longboard bearings and they said they've never seen this happen before, in a few days I've received a whole new set of wheels.

Conclusion

I never skateboarded but got a hang of it pretty quickly regardless of my awful computer programmer leg coordination. Had it for about a month. The better I get the more fun I have, and I keep thinking how "I could be skating right now". There is like 10% of the people that go insane when they try it and they seem to be ready to sell their soul to satan to get one.

It does perfectly what it intends to do, it's called a cruiser and its a great product for fun commuting.

It turned out that I really like this technology and I'll get a Evolve carbon board which seems to be the best board I can buy right now, its heavier, with big wheels and costs as much as a car so its definetely not for everyone, but putting it out there also. Marbel board looks like an e-go killer, but its not out yet.

When buying, I've made this quick table, haven't found comparisons like this online surprisingly, so I'll share this too.

boardspeedrangeweightprice

marbel 40kmh 20km 4.4kg 1299 usd

e-go 20kmh 30km 6.3kg 750 usd

bamboo 38kmh 30km 8kg 1240 usd

bamboo terrain 35kmh 15km 10kg

carbom street 38kmh 40km 8.5kg 1700 usd

carbon terrain 35kmh 25km 10.5kg 2000 usd

boosted 32-35kmh 10km 6-7kg 1300 usd

z-board pro 32kmh 20km 11kg 750 usd

Long Term

Owned the board for about 4 months now. I've had a lot of hardware issues. Luckily, the support is very good.
Drive wheel fell off - bearing broke, they sent me new wheels. Then, the whole board randomly died, shipped it to them, they fixed it, it randomly died again a week later in a slightly different way, shipped it again, waiting to get it back. deliveries in eu are fast (3-4 days one way) but still, the whole process takes at least 10ish days when there is an issue like this. I think 25% of the time I've owned the board, I couldn't use it.

I also met another person which owned a board for much longer then me, treats it badly, and have had 0 issues.

Video

people often ask me why I own a drone, what is it for, and then half of the time they say that I could use it to record weddings and get some cash flowin'

If mention of recording weddings doesn't kill all my will for conversation, I'll say drones are so simple to make these days that I find it hard to justify not owning one.
also, at the time there is no regulation and no one ever counts on you owning a flying robot, so its a sweet spot to own one.
a drone is a flying sidekick, it can, in theory, do whatever a flying sidekick can do. it can enter through windows and steal jewlery with its tiny robot hands. Sounds ridicilous but technically it is not hard to do. In the following years we'll have to rethink space and what can be done, and before that happens, I get to be a kind of a superhero.

today, drones are very primitive. I'll fix some parts that I care about. and if I make anything useful, Im guessing drone related kickstarter projects would be welcome.

a few ideas,

work on being more autonomus, gesture recognition, landing on backpack, automatic charging, simple commands like follow me, land and observe, and such

picking up bread in the morning

ground locomotion, wheels or legs!

stringing a rope somewhere high or for a tyrolean traverse - I can be a very slow batman and I always wanted to string a hammock up between two buildings.

guarding a camp spot and scarring bears away

looking for people

planting and picking up sensors

security? (I'm terrified of security robots working against me, I'm excited about security robots working for me - maybe I won't touch this.)

obvious things like scouting or mapping, it would be nice to have something that creates a google maps or openstreetmap layer as it flyes around, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement, in theory :)

few concrete things to work on, sorted by priority

integrate a real computer (starting with beaglebone in my case, will need to reverse and implement sbus and naza CAN bus protocols)

long range modem - something like xbee xtend and/or sim cards for control over gsm

We've discovered a strange man made island while looking at satelite images of cebu bay 10.284983,123.902841

I'm publishing this information as the last info I could find online was a few years old and we didn't know what to expect.. This is what we knew,

Formerly a Fuel Depot of Shell Pilipinas. It was return to the government in 1990's. There was some Human Rights issues raised after the government took control because it was made as a "temporary housing" facility for known petty criminals one week before a Sinulog Festival. They were herded and housed for two weeks or during the duration of the festival.. a free board and lodging..

We approached the island from mactan side in a small kayak, we had 5 km to pass through a strange shallow shrubberish water, I'd recommend approaching from cebu side which is cleaner and is only 1 km away from the island. Some people live there, they were not particulary happy or sad to see us, they've built a small duck farm in one of the buildings and a few dogs are roaming around.
Industry on the island has been entirely stripped down, a few buildings are still standing and the most interesting thing is a half sunken 15m-ish boat in what remains of the port.

So, we'd like to carry a boat for going down rivers and exploring curious things on water, while being self sufficient with food and camping equipment. Giving up on the boat and building bamboo rafts was one of the propositions:) We ended up buying a small 12kg inflatible kayak that packs in a 60L backpack,

I've discovered today that we are completely defeated by this awesome guy 200 years ago.

Halkett had long been interested in the difficulties of travelling in the Canadian Arctic, and the problems involved in designing boats light enough to be carried over arduous terrain, but robust enough to be used in extreme weather conditions.
the hull of the boat could be worn as a cloak, the oar used as a walking stick, and the sail as an umbrella

Spurred on by the successful testing of the boat-cloak, Halkett designed a larger version that folded into a knapsack. When inflated, it could carry two men, operating a paddle on each side, and when deflated served as a waterproof blanket to allow the users to camp on wet ground
Although the Admiralty saw no use to which Halkett's designs could be put in general naval service, this larger design was extremely well received by explorers